Opened my portfolio album today to continue adding images. Added a couple of new ones and did a make all album; but to my horror, the album opened in the default setting, with all my own settings, including all the manually entered Info+ details have gone! So right back to square one.
The jAlbum setting seem to have been retained, it's only the LightFlow ones that have reverted to the initial default.
I had saved the album settings periodically yesterday, and in fact uploaded the last album produced to my website test folder.
Is there any way to rescue my earlier settings? Perhaps from the album that I uploaded yesterday?

Update:
Well after adding all the main LightFlow settings back manually and publishing again to a local folder, the original Info+ text re-appeared. So presumably, some info was retained in the Project Settings file. I am continuing now, but a bit "nervous" over this strange behaviour

That's really weird! I never heard of such a problem before. Saving and restoring skin settings is done transparently by jAlbum.
Are you sure that you loaded the same project that you've saved the day before? Please have a look in the list of recent album projects in jAlbum's menu "File -> Open recent album project".

Restoring the settings of a built album is not easier than set them anew.

Which jAlbum version are you using? Do you have or had any messages in the jAlbum's system console? You can open it by pressing F7 or click on "Tools -> System console". If something bad happend, there should be at least an error trace.

Which Info+ settings re-apperaed? The global ones or the local ones? You know, you have global Info+ text which apply to all images which does not have any local Info+ text. I'm asking because they are stored in different places.

There is one thing a user can do that causes symptoms like this. If you open a saved project, but then accidentally hit the "skin" choice drop-down box, even if you choose the same skin again, the settings will revert to their defaults. In effect, you have reloaded the skin. Per-image settings, since they're not stored in the .jap file, won't be affected by this, but everything else will be.

Hi jGromit,
I cannot now really remember the exact sequence of events, but I think this might be the answer. I saved the project settings last night, uploaded the part completed album to my test web folder, the copied the entire album project folder, including the output one, to another location on my computer.

This morning when I opened jAlbum, I noticed that the default skin appearing was not LightFlow. So before opening anything at all, changed that to LightFlow. I then went to file, open recent projects (rather than click on the little thumbnail top left for the recent project.

Anyway, the project has now opened as I left it last night - phew! -:) So in future, I'll be aware of the issue you mention, and copy the entire project folder to another location at the end of each work session.

Hi Kaya,
Yes it took me completely by surprise! -:) And although I have not used jAlbum for some years now, do not recall anything like this happening. I am ok again now as per my reply to jGromit; but in answer to your questions:
1) Yes it was the same project; I only have the one - a draft portfolio.
2) jAlbum version 12.2.4 Pro
3) There is nothing in the top panel of the console now; but maybe having updated things, they would not be current now anyway?
4) All info+ text re-appeared. Yes I was aware of how this works; so had set a basic default as a global text and then amended it as required for images for which that info was inappropriate.
I am ok again now thanks, but one suggestion having now used the skin, is to make the info+ text area much bigger. I am preparing the text to be shown here in a separate html editor, but having pasted in the code, it would be nice to be able to at least see it in situ. The small database field "window" does not allow this.

Another suggestion would be to have an option to change the top menu font and its size. I have a number of folders to include so need to reduce the defaults. I can do this via the css file, but this gets overwritten when you publish again. So I will leave this until I have more folders online.

But overall, I think this skin is great! -:)
So, "onwards and upwards" -:)
Peter

Phelan wrote:
So in future, I'll be aware of the issue you mention, and copy the entire project folder to another location at the end of each work session.

That's probably overkill, but it can't hurt. One thing I highly recommend is an automatic backup program (I use Carbonite, but the competitors are just as good). It has saved me from myself a few times, since you can retrieve a previous version of a file (like jalbum-settings.jap, the critical one for hanging on to your project settings) if you do something that clobbers it.

Being an old sysadmin, I'm paranoid about backing things up, so I also have a second hard drive in my PC, and have a little utility program that copies new or changed files from the main hard drive to the backup. I run it manually, typically whenever I'm finished fiddling around with stuff. Takes only seconds, since it's copying only the changed files.

Finally, could a java update have affected things?

No. In fact, if you're using the regular distributed version of jAlbum, it has its own Java bundled with it, and you don't need to install or update Java on your own at all.

If you're using jAlbum without bundled Java, switching Java versions, like from Java 7 to Java 8, will trigger one little bit of odd behavior. When you Make Album on an older project, it will have to reprocess all the images the first time, because of some underlying changes in Java. It happens only once, of course - the first time you make the album after switching Java versions. But if you've got a large album, it tends to catch you off-guard!

Hi again jGromit,
Yes I agree on the backup stuff. I do actually run automatic backups, to a multitude of external USB hard drives, Qnap NAS, Buffalo Linkstation and up to Amazon S3. Indeed I have GoodSync automatically and continually backing up my "current work" folder. But, I had left jAlbum with its default into "My Albums" - which was not included in any GoodSync schedule; just a normal Macrium Reflect one that runs overnight and had yet to run.

I have changed the jAlbum folders now to be inside my "current work" one, so GoodSync will copy its contents every 15 mins now. Another option is to convert my four bay NAS to a RAID one of course.

Online storage such as Carbonite has its place, but is not really practical for me, since I deal with vast quantities of data. Single client work PSD files can be 600 - 800 meg and I am now dealing with HD video too! -:) I have some stuff up on S3, but it would take months of continuous uploading to get even a small part of my work archive online.

Anyway, thanks to this little hiccup, I now know to make up a simple test gallery, if I want to play around with other skins for further projects! -:)
With kind regards,
Peter